Showtime was generous enough to send eight and six episodes, respectively, of Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara. My midseason TV-writing schedule, however, has not been quite so generous, so I have yet to get through both megasets of screeners. I’m going to spin it, however, and say that this is actually better for blog purposes, because I won’t be eight weeks ahead of the episodes by the time they air and I may want to blog about them.

In any case, I can at least recommend the debuts of each second season. Jackie was one of my favorite new series of last year from the get-go, and while I both admired and had issues with Tara at first, it’s grown beyond the early episodes (which sometimes seemed to be less a series than an acting showcase for Toni Collette, albeit an effective one since she won an Emmy) to become a well-developed family ensemble. Check them out if you have Showtime, and time permitting I’ll write more later. Or delegate the job to one of my alternate personalities.